Cop Busted for Using Hidden Bathroom Cameras to Film Pooping Men

Here's a contender for Best Local News Story of 2014: Through dogged, gumshoe reporting, KTVI's Chris Hayes tracked down the person—a now-former cop—who police say placed hidden cameras in restrooms around Chesterfield, Mo. and posted videos of men pooping to the internet.

"When I saw myself pooping, I was just like you've gotta be kidding me," Rob Cheney told KTVI, adding that he'd just moved to Chesterfield last month. "Three weeks and I'm already on a poop cam pretty much. So three weeks and everybody's seen me poop? That's terrible. Hahaha."

Hayes, who was first tipped off about the filming scheme when someone found a hidden camera in a bathroom at the Chesterfield Mall, noticed that many of the secretly-videoed men were wearing they same uniform. That led him to Cheney, who he asked to remember what bathrooms he'd recently used.

"I had to think because you don't document everywhere you go to the bathroom, so it took me a while to pinpoint where it was," Cheney said.

Then Hayes got to work. From KTVI:

Fox 2 checked his list of rest rooms, comparing the online video to each bathroom. Then we found a perfect match, from the floor tiles to the drain by the toilet.

…

But we found no camera when we first discovered the bathroom. We took our investigative research to Chesterfield Police.

The key break, according KTVI, came when Hayes noticed that the pooping bathroom webpage, which shut down during the investigation, linked to a house in St. Charles County owned by the suspect, later identified as Officer David Cerna, a six-year veteran of the Chesterfield Police Department.

From St. Louis Today:

Cerna has admitted to the crimes and told investigators he placed ads on Craigslist posing as women wanting casual sex, and would send photos of a woman he didn't know to men who responded.

After sending photos, Cerna provided a cellphone number and sent text messages from that number, giving his home address with instructions on what to do when men came to the front door.

Cerna said he would record video of men having anonymous oral sex with Cerna through a hole in a door. As many as 60 men visited his home over 18 months, Cerna told police.

Cerna was arrested after a raid on his home and charged with invasion of privacy in St. Louis and St. Charles counties.

"The Chesterfield Police Department has arrested one of our own officers, working from a tip from an investigative reporter Chris Hayes from Fox 2 News." Chesterfield Police Chief Ray Johnson said at a press conference. "It was rather shocking of course and took a minute to sink in, but we realized the severity of it and just set out to deal with it immediately as we would with any other suspect."